THEY like their beef in Texas. So when Texan ranchers started offloading their cattle at bargain prices because pastures were parched - as they did this summer - it was a clear sign that this was no ordinary drought. While rains in October brought some relief, further drought is forecast, which will add to losses already exceeding $5 billion. The bigger question is whether the Texan rancher's pain is a harbinger of things to come for the entire Southwest - and if so, what the broader impact on Americans living in the region will be. Climate models indicate that the Southwest will get drier in the coming decades, threatening water supplies already under pressure from a growing population and ageing infrastructure. The most alarming projections come from a team led by Richard Seager of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. They ran 19 climate simulations, averaged out across the entire Southwest, and came to a stark conclusion: that conditions matching the 1930s Dust Bowl and the multi-year droughts of the 1950s "will become the new climatology of the American Southwest" within decades (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1139601)...more
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